Finding a casualty can be quite a traumatic experience. It causes people to feel a wide range of emotions from frustration and anger to being upset and crying. In addition, it can be very difficult to find someone to help. This compounds the frustration and multiples the emotions. Covid has not helped with resources being more limited nationally, with some rescue centres having only just re-opened their doors, and other working limited hours still and many just not able to provide an out of hours, because they don’t have the resources.
Here at WRAS we decided that we wanted to put measures in place to continue providing our service round the clock the best we could. We also decided to continue providing as much of an out of hours service as we could, but only dealing with emergencies, as the staff who help cover also have to work during the day. Providing this service does stretch us to our limit. Our staff and volunteers go out of their way to do as much as they can.
In many parts of the UK and even in parts of neighbouring counties, services like WRAS do not exist especially out of hours. Some wildlife hospital rely on people delivering casualties and will not collect or go out to rescues. Nevertheless, here is East Sussex, WRAS does.
We frequently receive calls from angry and frustrated people who are clearly struggling to deal with the emotions of finding a sick or injured casualty. We especially find people who have found sick or injured pets or agricultural animals get very frustrated because they cannot get help. We often experience very aggressive behaviour towards us. We do understand, empathise and appreciate that this this behaviour is caused by the frustration of the incident and out of desperation to get the poor creature the relief and care it so needs. Over the last ten years, we have increased our ability to deal to deal with rescues from with around 1500 rescues up to 4000 a year. Frustratingly this never seems to be enough.
We need your help; the only way we are going to be able to help more casualties and people, especially out of hours is to have more regular support and donations. We need trained staff to provide emergency out of hours coverage, rescue and treatment. If you can spare us just £1 a month as a standing order, it would help us budget and plan for the future. If you can’t commit to a regular donation please consider a one off donation. We promise you that we will continue to strive to expand and improve our service so we can help even more people.
You can donate here or set up a standing order here.
Thank you - we, the public and wildlife of East Sussex really appreciate your support.
